Solving technology problems, one at a time
A customer’s course was crashing Internet Explorer when a popup window script executed. It turns out that the name of the new window contained a space. This didn’t bother Safari or Firefox, but Internet Explorer
Continue readingAs you add modules to Drupal, the “Edit” screen of each node can start piling up a lot of optional filters and settings that you can apply to the node. These include comment settings, input filters, image pickers and browsers, authoring settings, etc. The general term for all these added features on the node edit screen is “fieldsets.”
Most of them are collapsed when you first open the screen, which makes it easy to scroll down to the “submit” button or the lower fieldsets. However some modules set themselves to be open by default. This can be a problem if you have to edit a lot of nodes – it causes a lot of extra scrolling and is visually confusing.
We found that some of our users did not know how to maximize windows (or even that it was possible!), and so never saw the navigation bar and buttons on the bottom of a Captivate-based course they had to take.
The customer who designed the course asked that we add instructions on maximizing the window, but I thought that it would make more sense just to make the window maximize itself.
It’s been a while since I used window sizing functions, so I went hunting for a script that works across all browsers.
After trying several, I found that some “auto-maximize window” scripts don’t even work every time on ANY browser. The one that worked best on every browser I tested it on is available free from Dynamic Drive, here.
Continue readingAfter doing a user import via csv into a new Drupal site, some new users could no longer register. When I attempted to create the users manually, I got this error: user error: Duplicate entry
Continue readingWhen I installed a new version of Drupal on one of my sites, an error showed up on the administration page:
The status page reports:
When attempting to launch browser-based SCORM courseware, people have been getting the error: “Several Java Virtual Machines running in the same process caused an error”
Apparently many people have this issue since upgrading java. I came across it because it can affect the delivery of elearning courses if the learning management system relies on a java-applet based scorm adaptor to communicate.
Continue readingA new security setting in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 has been causing problems with requests between iframe and parent. There is a security setting in the Internet options called “Navigate sub-frames across different domains”, which in IE6 was set to “Enabled” under Medium security, but is set to “Disabled” in IE7 by default.
An example of the type of communication that is blocked is shown here:
The container page sends a message to Page 1, in Domain A: “Change your location to Page 2”. In IE6, this is not a problem. But in IE 7, it is allowed.
Continue readingHow do you use javascript to get the value of a variable on the opener page, from a popup window? Use “window.opener.variablename“. This will work as long as the pages are in the same domain.
It consists of 2 pages. On the first page, a variable “timer” has been defined, and it automatically increments upward every 5 seconds. The current value is displayed in a div on the opener page.
Continue readingI maintain a library of learning modules which are constantly under development and revision. Our users often want PDFs to print out or view off-line, but we can’t maintain up-to-date PDF’s of each module manually. We needed a way to make on-demand PDFs of whatever the current state of the module is when the pdf is requested.
After looking at many pdf solutions I settled on “ABCpdf ASP 6.0” by WebSuperGoo.com.
ABCpdf has the advantages of fairly low cost (about $400.00 for one server, or FREE if you link back to them), a better HTML-rendering engine than most, and an easy to learn API, so you can write custom dynamic PDF applications.
Continue readingAmazon “aStores” are very easy to set up, but you will probably find you want to customize the navigation, particularly if you want to integrate the store into your own site. I’m in the process of doing just that, and decided to construct my own navigation system for the DesignSpace book shop.. The php script that creates the tabs for the store is based on the YUI (Yahoo UI) “Tab View Control” and can be easily adapted to your own site.
This is just a down and dirty approach but it is a good start for you to build from.
